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Thursday 12 February 2026
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for what we mean by Science Fiction; here for the masthead; here for some Statistics; here for the Acknowledgments; here for the FAQ; here for advice on citations. Find entries via the search box above (more details here) or browse the menu categories in the grey bar at the top of this page.
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Carver, Jeffrey A
(1949-2026) US author who began publishing sf with "... Of No Return" in Fiction Magazine for 1974. His first novel, Seas of Ernathe (1976), which serves as an introduction to the loose Star Rigger sequence of Space Operas, showed early signs of a love of plot and thematic complexity which would take him some time, and several novels, to control. The continuation, Star Rigger's Way (1978), for instance, combines quest ...
Hayter, Alethea
(1911-2006) Egyptian-born editor and author, in the UK from early adulthood, never affiliated to an academic institution, whose nonfiction work (not unusually for a non-institutional scholar) was significantly innovative; she is probably best known for the bio-critical study, Opium and the Romantic Imagination (1968), which focuses attentively on Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834). Her early novels as by J C Fennessy include Eden Island (1941), whose ...
Julverne
Belgian prog-rock group with a classical chamber-music flavour, named, evidently, after Jules Verne, although the most obviously Vernean title in their discography, Le Retour du Captain Nemo (1993), is in fact a "greatest hits" collection. The band's first two albums Coulonneux (1979) and A Neuf (1981) are playful, witty and self-admittedly "Un Peu Pretentieux" ("a little pretentious", the title of a track on the second ...
Skullduggery
Film (1970). Universal Pictures. Produced by Saul David. Directed by Gordon Douglas. Written by Nelson Gidding based on Les Animaux denaturés (1952; trans Rita Barisse as You Shall Know Them 1953; vt Borderline 1954; vt The Murder of the Missing Link 1958) by Vercors. Cast includes Susan Clark, Paul Hubschmid and Burt Reynolds. 105 minutes. Colour. / Adventurer Douglas Temple (Reynolds) guides ...
Craig, David
Pseudonym of UK author and journalist Allan James Tucker (1929-2023), whose Roy Rickman series, beginning with The Alias Man (1968), is essentially a jeremiad about a then-imminent 1970s world crisis of the Cold War, with the UK becoming in the Near Future a Soviet satellite, though it offers a sufficient sf displacement through the exploits of the multi-national spy Rickman to be of some interest. [JC]
Robinson, Roger
(1943- ) UK computer programmer, bibliographer and publisher, active in UK Fandom for many years. The Writings of Henry Kenneth Bulmer (1983 chap; rev 1984 chap) is an exhaustive Bibliography of one of the most prolific sf writers, Kenneth Bulmer, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its ...